Following the Expert Advice of International Bureaucracies

Scholars of International Organizations increasingly recur to expert authority as a means through which International Organizations, in general, and international bureaucrats, in particular, can influence policy-making. However, little is known on how this particular quality of International Bureaucracies can influence the domestic implementation of policy recommendations made by these organizations. While the literature on policy transfer frequently mentions International Organizations as important actors that can disseminate policy models across nations, it rarely engages the particular means International Bureaucracies have at their disposal to facilitate these kinds of transfers. Against this background, we explore whether, how, and under what conditions expert authority can help international bureaucracies to successfully transfer policies to states and thus influence domestic policy-making. In doing so we contribute to conceptual debates on the domestic influence of international organizations and methodological discussions on measuring international authority. We start by arguing that expert authority can serve as an important means of international bureaucracies to transfer policies. We differentiate expert authority from more hierarchical means of policy transfer, like legal or coercive properties. International Bureaucracies regularly give advice to national policymakers, either by disseminating global best practices or by tailoring advice to a specific country. The likelihood that said advice is adhered to in the domestic policy process hinges on the way key decision-makers evaluate the advice. We argue that expert authority serves as a source heuristic - a kind of cognitive shortcut which allows domestic policymakers to evaluate claims based on the qualities they ascribe to the source, rather than the contents of said claim. We then discuss how the influence of expert authority can be tested in the context of the domestic policy-making process. To do so, we explore how expert authority can be operationalized and measured. Then we illustrate how similarities between the International Bureaucracies advice and implemented policies can be the result of interdependent or independent processes. We discuss ways to address this challenge of independence in qualitative research. Finally, we illustrate our arguments through a discussion of the role that the OECD played in the tax reforms of the Bachelet government in Chile in 2014 and of the Santos government in Colombia in 2016.